Environmental thinking has progressed a long way during the past twenty years. The frequency of UN conferences, expert seminars, books, newspaper articles, TV programmes testify to this. They are both the cause of growing and widespread concern among the public, and the result of it. Yet, there still exist people whose modes of thought are mired in the pre-Stockholm era. What is frightening is that the number is not small, and many are in positions of considerable influence. We regularly meet captains of industry and senior officials of government who, with a smug shrug of their shoulders, continue to believe that pollution is the price we have to pay for “progress”. Pollution and waste, deforestation and soil erosion, floods and drought. The price gets higher by the day, and the value of the benefits gets lower. And the pace of industrialisation continues to accelerate. Of course, past pricing structures made some resources such as air and water almost free; and others like energy far too cheap. The full costs of industrial activity to society and environment never had to be included in the feasibility calculations. And information on these issues is, even now, skimpy and unreliable. But even with present prices and information, we could have expected better performance by the industry. After all, they themselves stand to benefit as much as anyone else. Pollution and waste are simply resources in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some enlightened industries found out a long time ago (in this business fifteen years is a long time) that pollution prevention actually pays. The concept was quite successful in a whole range of industries, and acquired its own name: PPP (not to be confused with the other PPP, the “polluter pays principle”). Pollution can be prevented by many different types of measures. The best known are those that rely on treating or cleaning up the pollution and wastes produced by a factory or power plant. These are known in the trade as “end-of-pipe” solutions, capable of providing visible evidence of action taken by the enterprise, though this may not necessarily be good economics or improve the environment. The easiest, quickest and least expensive method is simply good house-keeping: to close the leaks and tighten the valves so that the production equipment performs as designed. Effective resource management can contribute considerably to savings, and therefore the profits, of the enterprise. Source reduction, involving some technology improvements as well, has been embraced by many businesses as one of the best investments they can make. Further gains, both in terms of pollution reduction and improved profitability, can be had by introducing substantial changes in the production technology and the raw material mix. Unfortunately, Third World industry has limited capability for developing such technologies, and even more limited access to the latest equipment from suppliers who are only too willing to supply unwanted, out-of-date equipment. So, industrialists, in large numbers, and with the implicit approval of the authorities, continue to pollute away in the name of national development. One way out of this impasse is offered by the techniques of “Cleaner Production” and “Lifecycle Analysis”. These methods do not go so far as to raise the kinds of fundamental questions on consumption patterns and lifestyles often addressed in these columns. However, they do examine closely the basic production systems and attempt to identify those sensitive points at which significant gains can be had for resource conservation. Third World industry does not yet have a massive investment in industrial plants. At present industrial growth rates, the bulk of industrial capacity in developing countries during the next two decades will be new. This gives us considerable advantage, provided we are able to negotiate indigenous development or foreign import of the right types of technology.
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